Chinese Navy vessel has railgun that can fire hypersonic missiles

Image: PHOTO: The gun on the bow is claimed to be a prototype railgun. (Haohan-Red Shark via Storyful)

The next generation of naval warfare appears to have come early, as a Chinese naval warship has been pictured out at sea carrying what appears to be an electromagnetic railgun.

A photo taken and posted by Weibo user (and prominent defence blogger) Haohan-Red Shark, purports to show the Type 072II Yuting-class tank landing ship Haiyangshan with a railgun mounted on its bow.

Compared to conventional artillery that uses gunpowder to fire projectiles — a practice that has been in wide use since the 1500s — a railgun uses a high-powered electric circuit to shoot a projectile along magnetic rails, firing at hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 or higher (five times the speed of sound).

Since then, Chinese media has been incrementally filing news reports on the development on the technology, with the Global Times reporting in March that Zhang Xiao, an associate research fellow at the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) University of Engineering announced her research team was responsible for the “largest repeating power supply system in the world”.